1. Field
This application relates to a method and an apparatus for processing a compressed texel block.
2. Description of Related Art
When a three-dimensional (3D) graphics frame is rendered, a large amount of calculations are required, and thus much power and many hardware resources are needed. Accordingly, when 3D graphics rendering is performed, it is important to reduce the amount of calculations.
To reduce the amount of calculations and accelerate a rendering speed in a pixel shading process of a 3D graphics rendering process, a graphics processing unit (GPU) is equipped with a texture processor.
The texture processor generates a texture needed for texturing. Texturing is a process of mapping an object formed in a 3D space to a previously prepared image, which is an important operation in the 3D graphics rendering process to reduce the amount of calculations. The previously prepared image is referred to as a texture. A texture may be previously prepared in a compressed form and stored in an external memory of the texture processor.
The texture processor receives a compressed texel block, in which texels forming a texture are compressed in units of blocks, from the external memory, processes the received compressed texel block to obtain a texture requested by a shader core, and transmits the texture to the shader core.